Tools for Collaboration
Allowing ad hoc groups of persons to communicate with each other is one of the fundamental aspects of collaboration, problem solving, negotiation, teaching and education, etc. To assist in communication, there has been an explosion of electronic communication tools such as electronic conferencing tools, e.g. synchronous and asynchronous conferencing, online chat, Instant Messaging, audio conferencing, videoconferencing, data conferencing, application sharing, remote desktop sharing, electronic meeting systems, collaborative management (coordination) tools, project management systems, knowledge management systems, and social software systems.
One classic approach is the lecture or seminar often involving a presentation using presentation software. To a large extent the traditional single person presentation or lecture has been maintained with the audience being in a rather passive mode as far as determining, constructing, augmenting or modifying the information to be presented is concerned.
As with other business processes, meetings are going digital. Increasingly, people are using computer technology alone and in conjunction with broadband networks to support their meeting objectives prior to and during an actual meeting. For example, e-mail is used to pass around files for people to read prior to a meeting.
Collaborative workspaces in corporate networks and on the Internet offer geographically distributed collaborators a virtual repository for documents related to a project or a meeting. Electronic meeting support systems, such as interactive network-connect white boards and videoconferencing appliances, are available for the benefit of those who share the same room as well as those who are in remote locations.
The AMIDA Final Public Report describes the overall methodology behind the development of meeting support technologies. It reports that numerous studies confirm that meetings dominate the way people work. Namely, according to a study conducted by MCI Worldcom in 2003 a business person participates in 60 meetings per month. People meet in groups for a multitude of reasons. They interact in numerous predictable and unpredictable ways and the results of their interactions are as varied as the people who participate and the projects on which they are collaborating or communicating. Studies of business processes also reveal that approximately 80% of the “workload” associated with a project or process happens in preparation for a meeting. In other words, many people view the “live” meeting as a milestone or deadline by which they can pace and measure their productivity and that of their colleagues. Unfortunately, for many information managers, being in perpetual meetings has reduced their ability to prepare adequately for the next meeting, perpetuating a vicious and negative cycle.
However, Marc Al-Hames et al. report in “Audio-Visual Processing in Meetings: Seven Questions and Current AMI Answers”, that although large parts of working days are consumed by meetings and conferences, unfortunately a lot of them are neither efficient, nor especially successful. They report a study in which people were asked to select emotion terms that they thought would be frequently experienced in a meeting. The top answer—mentioned from more than two third of the participants—was “boring”; furthermore nearly one third mentioned “annoyed” as a frequently perceived emotion.
The conclusion is that despite the plethora of electronic aids to meetings, fundamental problems in handling meetings have not been solved. In fact organising and conducting meetings in a business context involves a large number of factors.
Participation
A lack of efficiency of meetings is addressed in the article “Mood indicators on electronic meeting tools” IBM, IP.com number: IPCOM000011711D, Publication Date: Mar. 12, 2003. This article addresses the issue that the lack of direct feedback makes meetings clumsy, inefficient and often unproductive. It proposes a “mood indicator” as well as an “I want to ask a question” indicator which allow the presenter to choose an appropriate moment to pause, change track or field a question. It is argued that interrupting a presenter in full flow can be awkward; however, sometimes it is difficult to get an opportunity to ask a question or make a comment when many different people are trying to make their voices heard. In a similar vein, U.S. Pat. No. 6,966,035 suggests displaying a “murmur frame” for a participant to express a view. To increase user participation, US 2010/0087139 discloses a system for sending a selection to another computer, and US 2006/0095376 discloses a system for secure voting. Commenting, voting or selecting requires that a central authority provides the information that is to be selected or commented or voted on. Hence, these proposals still leave a central figure such as the presenter in a dominating position and the other members of the meeting are largely an audience with limited selection or voting or participation rights.
A further problem with meetings is that someone is usually late or has to leave early. With the person arriving late one has to decide if the meeting is interrupted and a summary of the proceedings so far is given. For the person leaving early (often a senior person), subsequent discussions can go missing. If there is a notes taker, this provides a personal summary of the meeting—but not an objective one.
Presents systems do not provide an optimal solution.
Legal and Security Issues
A legal requirement of a meeting is that presentations, comments and submissions need to be completely reproducible—in some circumstances, e.g. in a share holders' meeting, the events in the meeting should be subject to total recall. Computer-supported collaborative work technologies, particularly those which capture human verbal and non-verbal communications (audio and video interaction) in addition to text and graphics generated during a meeting, promise to have a long term impact on how people will prepare for and behave during and following meetings. In addition, connecting to a network brings the danger of virus, malware or spyware transfer in either direction, and there is danger of copying of confidential information.
Practical Difficulties
Scalability and Ease of Use
There are even more fundamental problems with using electronic tools in meetings. If two persons want to make two presentations then usually either both presentations must be placed on one machine or there is a need to swap between the presenters' machines. To bring the display content of a computer to a projector, the most common ways are to use a cable that connects the display adapter of the graphics card to the video input of the projector [method 1] or to use a software that captures the display contents and sends it over a wired or wireless network to a remote base unit connected to the projector [method 2]. This is often called “remote desktop” and is mostly used for remote administration or remote IT assistance purposes.
Less common but also practiced methods are to use a special device connected to the display adapter of the graphics card that captures, encodes and streams the display content over a wired or wireless network [method 3].
Method 1 has several practical problems and disadvantages. In meetings where people want to contribute content from their own computers, e.g. to project images on a display, typically a video cable such as a VGA cable is used to connect each PC one at a time to the projector. This is not only not scalable but also can be and often is quite a cumbersome process that typically wastes valuable meeting time and takes the dynamism out of the meeting. Connection can be made more difficult and time consuming for example if the computer has to be rebooted for it to detect the projector or when the format of the PC differs from the format of the projector. In addition changing format can leave the computer with a new format that is not compatible with its own screen so that on reboot of the PC alone, nothing is displayed on the computer screen. Without a visible screen image the necessary re-configuration can be difficult. These issues are aggravated by a number of elements:                The use of many different video adapters, such as VGA, DVI, DP, HDMI, . . .        Reach depends on cable length: too long leaves a tangled cable “salad” in the meeting room, too short reduces flexibility, often necessitating people to move around in the meeting room when they want to present something.        Cable connection is either point to point or requires tedious and extensive cabling and the use of complex and expensive video switches.        It is often difficult and time consuming to find the right display resolution and refresh rate that both the computer and the display or projector support.        
Method 2 also has many drawbacks. If the connection is made to a corporate LAN there is a danger of virus, malware or spyware transfer in either direction, there is danger of copying of confidential information, and there is the difficulty of making the connection, e.g. entry of a user code and password, as well the administration of such passwords and user codes.
The advantage of method 3 is that the computer does not need to use its own processing power to bring the display content in a form that is easily transported over a network. This advantage becomes less relevant as computers grow in processing power. A drawback of method 3 is that the same problems often encountered with method 1 of connecting to the display adapter remain. Another drawback is that the special device referred to requires significant processing power, which means that this device will consume much power, be relatively big and certainly be relatively expensive.
An alternative method in the making today is to use the well known USB interface of the computer for extracting the display content of the computer. US 2009/0198839 discloses such a pluggable cable arrangement. US 2011/0115689 discloses a similar USB solution for wireless connection to a projector. Accordingly connecting a projector to a computer using the standard USB port might become commonplace with time. However, this usually requires special drivers and even special hardware. Connecting a projector to a computer using the standard USB port hence might become commonplace—but even when that happens there will be a mix of new and legacy machines for several years.
Firewalls
Additional problems can occur with firewalls. Typically a visitor to a meeting will bring a computer such as a laptop that is set up for a different corporate networking environment and hence has different or incompatible networking settings. The setting up of a firewall can be complicated and if this is not done correctly, telecommunication software that has to pass through a firewall may be blocked. In order to solve problems associated with firewalls it may be necessary to open ports or identify or even add programs in an exception list. If, besides a network (hardware) firewall and an operating system firewall, there is any software based third-party firewall like Zonealarm, Norton Systemworks, CA Internet Security Suite or McAfee Firewall, then it is necessary to follow that software developer's documentation to place programs on a safe list or adding exceptions to the firewall rules. Such activity is beyond the usual user. Fussing with computer settings, or having to call for IT support wastes valuable meeting time and takes the dynamism out of the meeting.